4 Client Retention Strategies You Should Know About

by Daniel Groves, Guest Writer

While client acquisition gets the lion’s share of attention, urgency and investment, client retention is every bit as important to growing a sustainable, successful coaching business. In this post, you’ll learn 4 simple client retention strategies to help you achieve just that.

If you’ve been working as a coach for a while, you’ll know that the flow of business can be volatile at the best of times. In many cases, your clients will come to you looking to develop one particular skill or quality, and once they feel they’ve got what they came for, there’s a good chance that they won’t sign up for another block of sessions.

Convincing clients to stick with your coaching programs can be tough, and if you’re unable to retain your clients, you’ll find it much harder to scale over time and grow your profits.

If you’re experiencing a high client churn rate, and you want to turn this trend around, then here’s four client retention tactics to apply to your future business strategy.

Meet and Anticipate your Client Needs

A good coach will listen to what their clients’ needs are, and tailor their service offering accordingly. A great coach, however, will be able to tweak their service offering pre-emptively and offer solutions to new needs before the client even voices them.

One of the advantages of a coach-client relationship is having the freedom to discuss your clients’ experiences during sessions. Set time aside to do a little more research on your clients’ backgrounds, their industries, and the kinds of challenges they might face both day to day and in the long term.

If you attract clients in a niche area of their industry, this can be as simple as following new thought leaders, reading their content, and discussing emerging trends with your clients. Aside from opening new avenues of conversation that will make your clients think about needs they didn’t even know they had, the knowledge you gain will remind them that you’re an expert, and make them feel they’re in capable hands.

Once you’re armed with these insights, you may be able to direct your conversations towards topics that will reveal some additional value to your client, and motivate them to stay on to develop new, specific skills.

Sweat the Small Stuff

In many cases, coaches struggle with a high churn rate not because of any issue with their branding, program structure, or sessions, but because of the basic customer service elements that are universal to all service-based businesses.

Little things like ensuring you’re replying to messages quickly, keeping on top of scheduling clashes, providing frictionless payments such as giving clients the option to pay with a phone, a well-designed site, and a user-friendly booking system, can all be highly effective ways of improving your clients’ experience and reducing churn.

If you’ve been coaching for a long time, and relying on the same set of processes and standards, it can be easy to slip into a state of complacency that will make it hard to reflect on your standard of service. 

If you’re not sure of where to start, there’s a simple solution: ask your clients!

Clients will appreciate an opportunity to give you some constructive feedback, as it will show them you care about their experience, and make them feel more valued. Find some regular time slots to actively gather feedback in any channel you have available, such as anonymous questionnaires, social media polls, or simply asking your clients what you could be doing better at the end of your sessions.

Hone your Personal Brand

Coaching is a uniquely personal service, and as such, clients will want to go to coaches who appeal to and connect with them on a personal level. 

Because coaching is such a competitive business niche these days, and your existing clients will be spoiled for choice if they go looking for a new coach, you’ll need to go the extra mile to develop a personal brand that your clients feel comfortable with.

Your personal brand is an amalgamation of various traits that are unique to you, such as your personal and professional background, values and beliefs, the kind of energy you bring to challenges, and the way you look, talk, and dress. By extension, it’s not just how you look, talk, and dress, but also how your program looks and feels to clients that reflects on your brand. Does the way you deliver it reflect high quality and professionalism? Or do aspects of it feel cobbled together?

This makes launching your own mobile app for clients to deliver your programs and complement the experience of working with you an excellent option. Having your own app in the app store raises the perception of professionalism and trustworthiness from the beginning and can help you quickly earn the respect of new clients.

Starting from a greater position of strength in client relationships is a great way to set yourself up for lasting engagement and client retention. And using modern software solutions to build your unique programming into a system that can be white labeled and launched as your own app is easier and more affordable than you might expect.

If you feel your churn rate is higher than it should be, then reviewing and cultivating your personal brand might be a great way to remedy this issue. Take some time to research what makes the most successful coaches unique in terms of their personal qualities, then figure out which of those qualities you can emphasize naturally in your own coaching.

By presenting a clear-cut personal brand, you’ll remind your clients that you’re precisely the right kind of person for their needs, and avoid coming off as a jack of all trades, master of none.

Set and Monitor Specific, Granular Goals

At the start of every new client relationship, your client will state what they’re hoping to get out of your service. This usually gets your programs off to a strong start, but as you both become more comfortable in your relationship, the end result you’re hoping for can start to become ill-defined, and your clients can lose an essential sense of direction.

A good way of mitigating this issue is to set out quarterly action plans that will keep the clients’ experience feeling fresh, exciting, and valuable. With each plan, specify a measurable end goal you’re hoping to achieve, and break this down into steps that are as granular as possible to nurture a constant sense that your clients are making progress.

These action plans should include a period towards the end of each quarter which is focused on planning the next quarter. This should include any milestones from the previous action plan that you weren’t able to achieve, along with filling space with new goals, sub-goals, and strategies that you’ll employ to help your clients reach them.

By setting out a more detailed roadmap to success, and celebrating the small achievements as you hit them, you’ll ensure that your clients always feel excited and motivated during their sessions.

Final Thoughts

We hope these client retention strategies serve you well as you work to optimize your coaching programs and combat your client churn rate. Client retention is always going to be a challenge, but if you use these cues to review the key elements of your programs, you’ll soon be delivering a more comprehensive and valuable service that will keep your clients coming back again and again!

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